Ask HN: How do you find time for pet projects?

I have two kids 6 and 8, and a girlfreind (for 14 years). I just can't help having a side project. My advoce would be to just keep trying. Focus on one project. Do small to do lists to keep crossing things of. And get something launched! Once you have people using your stuff, thats a great motivator. Eventually you'll find something you just can't let go. Or at least I did. Right now I'm doing http://muscula.com And I also have http://obsurvey.com that I started in 2007

Keep going, less is more.

I work full time, am married and only have 1 project I'm working on. I used to work 4 day work weeks. This was wonderful in terms of productivity. My body and mind was used to 11 hour days, so when Friday rolled around I slept in an extra hour 'til 6:30 (yay!) and went crazy. The only problem, was a lot of it was poor. I'm a sys/network admin by trade. So for me to sit down and work on code with databases, it wouldn't ever come naturally. One way I increased my productivity was I went to Openshift as a platform. My day job/natural line of thinking then became irrelevant.

Then I switched to 5 day work weeks and began commuting with my wife. We only worked about 10 minutes apart but were 30 minutes each away from our place. This gives us 30 minutes of pretty much one-on-one time where we can sit and talk to each other. Or just space out together. It's really quite wonderful. It also keeps in contact with each other more... because if she has meetings or something comes up, we let each other know. Before we'd rarely send text messages to each other. Now, it's a bit more frequent.

I only work on 1 project. That seems to be a general consensus here, and it's fairly relevant. Everything I work on stems from this single item. If I want to design, I do it. If I want to develop, I do it. DB stuff? Done. Want to do sys admin stuff? Save it for work tomorrow.

One thing I never do though, is neglect my wife. If she wants my full attention, she has it. Doesn't matter if I haven't ':w' in an hour and my laptop is about to die. I push it aside and focus on her. Life become copacetic.

Dude, you're the sh!! You sleep avg of 5h/night? That's good. For me, what works is ditching what's irrelevant like TV and the likes.

I have a kid, a life, and I running my start-up and still there is enough time for pet projects. I do pet projects mainly on weekends, not the entire day, but a few hours of it. I also do a few hours at night, but that is rare.

You don't need many hours, you need to make a good use of the hours you get.

For example, I know that I will have only 3-4 hours on Saturday and Sunday. If I don't do what I need to do, I will have to wait another week. As a result, I am really focused on the core of my pet project.

This works for me. I know people that prefer doing it a few hours a night, but I rarely can. At end it is just a question of focus and organization. If you do those two things well I am sure you will find the right amount of time for your projects.

To posit a different answer, some of us had kids well before we were bitten by the entrepreneurial bug.

At 35, I don't consider myself even remotely too old to still be doing things, and my daughter will turn 11 next month. That means that she was born about 11 years ago, and frankly, I had no clear idea of a career path above and beyond just working my way up the company ladder. It wasn't that it hadn't been done obviously, but the internet wasn't as prevalent 11 years ago, and there weren't near the resources then as there are now.